I’m not sure what my plans are with journaling and blogging moving forward. This confusion has to do with where to post my information. I know my plan to journal my life is to blog daily. That’s the easy part of the decision.

The confusion is figuring out where I want to post my material. I have three different blogs with a ton of material on each of them. One is a family blog that is posted for the whole world to see. I put it in place so family and friends would be able to follow the major happenings in our family, especially since I suck at keeping in touch with those close to me. The family blog is something to chronicle our family life and I picture my children referring to it when they are older. It’s like a baby book (which we never bothered to do for any of them) on steroids. I have no problem with that one remaining in the public domain (although Mrs. Mac occasionally has issues with it).

That leaves me with the two other blogs and I’m not sure how to incorporate them with my current devotion to journaling. One is in the public domain (The Internet Journalist) and one is private. The private one is password protected and no one has read from the private blog aside from myself.

The Internet Journalist has a bit of a following to it (although I haven’t updated it since May of 2011). I’ve had 101,118 page views to the blog, including 19,872 people who visited my Hillsborough post on one day (September 12, 2012, the day that British Prime Minister David Cameron apologized to the families of the Hillsborough survivors for the cover-up by the British government).

Although The Internet Journalist is in the public domain, I’ve done a decent job of keeping things private. I’ve tried to take the approach of writing it under a pseudonym (Mac, The Internet Journalist) and I’ve made it a point not to include family names, family pictures, or anything too specific that would identify me to the outside world. That kind of material is saved for the family blog. Obviously someone that knows me well would be able to decipher exactly who the author of the blog was within minutes.

I like the concept of blogging in the public arena. It’s great to have followers to a blog and I enjoy the interaction that comes with readers commenting. There is a kick you get when you write something and you know that people come back repeatedly to check for updates. I don’t mind exposing some of my thoughts and feelings but I don’t want to be accused of airing all of my dirty laundry in public. Mrs. Mac is not a fan of the online world and she can’t understand the need of people to share stuff with complete strangers. I happen to be one of those people she doesn’t understand. I don’t know why but I find it easier to share things with strangers but difficult to share with those closest to me. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but then again, I never claimed to make much sense.

Perhaps the solution is to post everything publicly. The few items I want to keep private I could simply post as private (which means a password is required) onto the public blog. I’ll have to think this issue through over then next couple of days. For now this post will go to the private blog while I piece things together. (If you’re reading this on the Internet Journalist, then I guess you know which way the decision actually went!)